HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 02/01/2000 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES
February 1, 2000
COMMITTEE MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Leona Orr, Sandy Amodt, Tom Brotherton, Tim
Clark, Connie Epperly, Rico Yingling
STAFF PRESENT: Brent McFall, Cliff Craig, Dena Laurent, Don Wickstrom, John Hodgson,
Jackie Bicknell
PUBLIC PRESENT: John Santana, Ron Seymour, Rachel Garson, Charles Blood, Josie Hipalit,
Amanda Wilson, Amy Fety
Chair Leona Orr called the meeting to order.
SeaTac Noise Study Update
Ron Seymour, Project Manager for the SeaTac Noise Study for the Port of Seattle -First of all,
I'd like to thank you for inviting us over tonight to brief you on what's going on with our Part
150 Study. Also in the room we have Rachel Garson who is with our Public Affairs Department
at the airport, and Charles Blood who is a business Manager.
Mr. Seymour gave a short explanation of Part 150, which he said was a study that airports take to
qualify for federal funds to do the sound insulation of buildings, homes, etc. The legislation
• initially started in 1985 from Congress and that's when SeaTac did its first Part 150 Study.
We've done updates ever since then. You do updates about every five to six years, to redo the
noise contour maps and take into account any changes that are going on at the airport. We
started this Part 150 Study in 1997, and with that we established a Citizens Advisory Committee
and a Technical Advisory Committee. From the Citizens Advisory Committee, there is a
representative for the City of Kent. Ms. JoAnne Schaut is on that committee. Someone from the
Planning Department is on the Technical Advisory Committee, and what we ask these
committees to do is to meet with us, help us develop the scope of the Study and determine
exactly what it is we need to look at as far as noise issues go.
We spent the year of 1998 doing noise monitoring all around the Seattle area to verify what the
noise conditions were like around the airport. Then the next step in the 150,which is where we
are right now, is you look at what you can do to make a difference. Try to reduce noise even
more than what has been achieved in the past. When you get to that point in the study, the very
first thing that always hits the radarscope is the flight track issue and that's where we are right
now. What we want to do is give you an update on some of the issues regarding flight tracks,
specifically departures and south flow and some of the ideas that have been thrown on the table
by citizens that had the potential to impact the City of Kent. What the Citizens Advisory
Committee came up with, as well as citizens at public open houses,was the idea of spreading out
the noise for the aircraft. What they wanted to do was to look at areas that have less population,
and in conjunction with that, spreading out the noise, so that, as they put it-more people can
share in the wealth of the aircraft and they share the pain. What we did was we approached air
Council Workshop, 2/l/00 2
• traffic control and asked the question of what can you do from the prospective of those
objectives the citizens would like to see(the spreading out of the aircraft)?
What you see up here is the first alternative that was developed. As you can see, the flight
pattern as it exists today, means everything goes south and then heads out over Dash Point.
Some aircraft head south and make their turn east. With the first proposal, aircraft would do an
immediate turn off the end of the runway to the east and then head down through here, which is a
145 degree radial, and I have a schematic of what that would look like. You can see this is what
we modeled as to what the aircraft tracks would look like as they head down into Kent Valley
and the Auburn Valley. What we're looking at here would be approximately 60% of the aircraft
on this track and 40%would still be on the straight out and turning this way, and that's strictly
based on final destination of the aircraft. So, that's one alternative.
The other alternative has this same flight track in it but would also have a flight track that heads
out west over Puget Sound. Within the packet that I handed out, on the left-hand side in the
back, there is a document that outlines these different scenarios. It's called a Summary of Flight
Track Alternatives and this includes both north and south flow, but starting on page eleven of the
document are the South Flow Alternatives and following that, are the different analysis that we
completed. All the different alternatives to determine what the impacts would be on people.
Total number of people. What noise levels people would experience with the differing
alternatives. Then, in the back of the packet, are the maps that show where increases would be,
where decreases would be. There's lots of information.
. What the proposals show at this point is that when you split the turns, you decrease the overall
number of people impacted by aircraft but you also impact new people, because of flight tracks
you'll be changing. So, that's the trade off and that's where it stands right now. The Port does
not have a position on this. We are waiting for the Citizens Advisory Committee to come to the
Port's staff with their recommendation. Port staff will take that recommendation along with
what we've heard from the general citizenry at the public open houses and make a
recommendation to the Port Commission in August and the Port Commission will vote on it. If a
flight track alternative is a recommendation, once it goes to the FAA for their approval (which
generally takes about six months following the completion of the Study, then it would go to an
EPA, environmental review and would likely go to a full Environmental Impact Statement. That
would add another twelve to eighteen months on top of the schedule. Following that, once it got
through that process, then air traffic control could actually develop the procedure and that would
take another nine to twelve months.
The bottom line is, if a flight track is a recommendation, we're looking at at least three to four
years before something would be flown on a different track. At this point they're strictly just
proposals. Just strictly ideas on the table. What we've been trying to do is brief all the different
communities around the area on what the proposals are. Depending on where you live, and what
community you are associated with,there are positive and negative impacts with all the different
proposals.
•
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• 1998 Audit Report
Finance Director May Miller- I'm pleased to bring Amy Fety. She's the Assistant Audit
Manager from the State Auditor's Office and she did our 1998 Audit. We're always going to be a
year behind. I haven't quite closed `99 yet, so she's going to be talking to you tonight about
what their role is in auditing. You know,how they and why they pick what they audit and how
they audit. Kind of the scope of the audit and then more specifically talk a little bit about the
1998 audit for the city and how that all worked out. And, with that I'm going to turn it over to
Amy.
Amy Fety- What I'm going to do is hand out a document. I know a couple of you have seen it.
You were at the Exit Conference with us, so it will look familiar to you. I think this is one the
best tools that we can use to explain our processes and what we do. We actually exited with the
city for the 1998 audit on October 11`h, so that's why that date is up there. We actually have
three main objectives when we audit the City of Kent. One, is that we look for compliance with
state laws and then we also have to audit for federal compliance, so your Community
Development Block Grants that come through, some of your street money funding coming
through, we also have to take a look at. We also look at your internal controls. So, for a good
example, over here in your main cashiering we'll look at cash handling procedures. We want to
make sure that your assets are safeguarded so we design tests to make sure everything's ok.
Then, the last thing we look at is for fair and proper presentation of your financial statements.
Are the numbers accurate? So those are three objectives.
We have a kind of fourth objective that's never really mentioned here and that's that we work
• with the city closely. Sometimes they'll bring things to our attention that they want us to look at.
There are times when we'll bring things to their attention and say-we think this is a risk area, so
we're going to take a look at it, and then we work together to try and come up with solutions.
For our audit period, we're always looking at the prior year. It's hard for us to get a feel of
things going on currently, when we're in there, so to get a big picture of everything we look at
prior year information. For 1998 there was some high risk in legal compliance areas that we
looked at. For example, we always read your minutes because that gives us an example or ideas
of what we need to look at. So, if you think nobody's looking at them, the auditors are. That
gives us some good indications. The other thing we do is we pull the numbers off of the
financial information from the city and we do some comparative analysis between years. If there
are big dips between numbers and amounts, we might take a look at that account for that area.
So, those are some drivers. The big driver is that we want to make sure that you have good
controls in place, because the risk is out there and what the public's always interested in is theft
of assets. It can be equipment, and the big one is always cash. You know what direction they
could take if a control was to break down.
High Risk and Legal Compliance—like I said, we look at your open public meetings, which is
basically reviewing your minutes. We'll look at bid compliance and that is a state law. Your
impressed accounts and petty cash accounts, that is your checking accounts out at the department
levels, so Parks and Recreation, Public Works, things like that. We'll look at official's conflict
of interest and we actually sometimes contact the PDC and get your disclosures to find out what
you do for a living and then we'll look at your vendor reports to make sure that there's no
. significant transactions going on.
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Budgeting—we look at the expenditures,payroll, and your voucher process to make sure that
everything going on there is okay. Then, always, the central cash receipting at City Hall,
because that's a big intake of money. You've got utility billings coming in, gambling taxes, a lot
of stuff going on. Payroll and then we'll always take a look at certain departments. So, last year
it was the Municipal Court, Parks and Recreation, your business licensing and then the Public
Works Department, we hit quite a few areas. We do issue an Audit Report. I don't know if
everybody got a chance to look at it. I will show you, I didn't make a copy of the thing because
it does get quite thick. This is what it looks like when it is finally published from out of office.
We call it the brown cover report and in there we give a description of everything that we've
looked at. The good things that we found and then if there's any problems that need to be
corrected, we also discuss those items.
Last year we reported information at three different levels. Under the current year issues, we
have an issue here called Findings, Management Letter Items, and Exit Items. To give a brief
description, Exit Items are things that we think the city can improve upon, so it's something that
we find that's not overly significant,but we think it's something that needs to be brought to their
attention. We'll bring it to everybody's attention to say here's a potential for something to
happen. Something could go wrong. Something could go sideways, so we want you to be aware
of potential risks in this area. If I go in the next year and a situation has not been resolved or it's
not addressed in some way, depending on the severity, I'll put it as a management letter, which is
what we call an in-between. So we write a management letter, because it is a more significant,
but it's not enough to report to the public. And then the third issue is a finding, that is if it is
never resolved or nobody is addressing the issues, then we will write it up.
Our findings are actually included in our report. So, if you see here, there are three areas where
we did report a finding in management letter items and exit items. The findings have to do
obviously with the Golf Course. It has been a concern for several years and we have actually
been in to visit for several years. We started off last year by reviewing the internal audit report
that was performed, based on recommendations that we made in 1996. What we found in the
internal audit report was what caused us to write Finding Number 1, because the controls in that
area were just so bad and it's so significant that we have to report this information to the public.
They have to be made aware. The second area had to do with the token machine revenue, which
was brought to our attention after a deposit came up. It was kind of a weird situation and alerted
us to say, hey, we need to take a look at this. So we went in, looked at it, found out that the
controls in that area were also broken and it was one of those situations where we couldn't
combine the two findings because it would have just made it very, very confusing. We had to
separate them out and make them separate issues.
May Miller - We also monitor any discrepancies and we look, not only on the golf course but at
any situation where we think a different pair of eyes could look at that and give us some ideas if
it seems to be going ok, or are there some changes we need to make. We do work really
proactively with the auditor's office and they, every couple of years, send different auditors and
so we have a different pair of eyes looking at issues and it's really been very helpful. We really
felt strength in all of our internal controls by working with the auditor's office.
•
Council Workshop,2/1/00 5
Amy Fety- What happens is that sometimes there's a cost benefit that you have to take into
consideration. Sometimes we'll address something or we'll see something, that a potential area
could be a problem, but the cost to fix it is a lot higher than the benefit that you would ever
receive from it. This could be a good example where, because of the cost benefit, we may just
repeat it to say, hey, you might want to do a little extra monitoring in this area, because you do
have several people that operate out of one cash drawer. Funds can be malleable. I know in
certain situations, in some of our entities, they don't have the funds available to fix some of their
problems. Like May said, the Finance Department and various individuals provide a lot of
oversight and monitoring, so that is a separate control you can have.
May Miller- Sometimes the recommendations, for example, might be that you really should
have separate people handling this,but that would mean you'd have to hire another staff person
and that's often what the recommendations are. Then we try to work with them to ask what else
we could do, other than hiring staff,because that you know we can't afford that. So often that's
some of the dialogue we go through as we try to solve these. Like she said, it might be that we'll
have another person sign off on these, we have this person do this step of it, or we try to really
work through how could we do it in a different way.
Amy- In the future it'll be a policy from our offices that we will always invite a board member
to entrance and exit. Whether you guys choose to come, it's up to you. But, you may receive a
letter in the mail saying we've begun the audit and this is when the entrance date will be held and
you're welcome to join us.
Strategic Planning in Government(Video)
Councilmember Tom Brotherton presented the 20 minute Strategic Planning in Government
video that he said speaks highly about how to tie the budget into the plans so that you can see if
you are funding the things you want to do really well.
Intergovernmental Report
Government Affairs Manager Dena Laurent—The end of this week marks the first cutoff in
policy committees in the house of origin. By next week we should start to see some budget and
transportation budget items floating and being discussed. Some have said this is a really boring
session. What they forget is that the action doesn't happen until the Ways and Means Committee
starts to report out their draft budgets and they are all going through the caucus meetings so that
everyone in the parties is on the same page. Issues of backfill of 695 losses or any funding for
transportation, which are issues that we're watching and waiting for, those are still out there.
There isn't any good information about those yet.
With regard to economic development tools, I want to thank Council member Clark who testified
on the ten-year Property Tax Abatement Bill for Downtown High Density Housing last week
before the house committee where it was being heard. He was very favorably received and it's
likely that that bill be get reported at the committee. Our Economic Development Manager,
Jacki Skaught testified this afternoon on the Tax Increment Financing Bill which would be
another tool to help us do infrastructure for major economic development projects. The ten-year
Bill has a greater chance than the Tax Increment Financing, but we're out there and that's
i
Council Workshop,2/l/00 6
something that's in our legislative agenda to look for more tools to do those things and we want
you to know that we're working on this.
I've talked to you in the past about Buildable Lands. This is the bill that would require us to do a
little more counting, a little more often, about the types of housing units that are being generated.
That bill was heard yesterday. There are lots of folks on both sides and it's likely to get reported
out of its committee because the committee chair is the prime sponsor of the bill. But the
question is whether the Ways and Means Committees will fund the cost of doing the additional
counting for cities. This bill is Senator Patterson's bill and she has said that if it is not funded,
she'll act to kill her own bill, so she will not impose a new unfunded mandate on cities to do this
additional work.
The Rights-of-Way legislation has been in negotiation between private and public sector folks
for three years now. The chair of the Senate Telecommunications Committee has said she wants
a bill this year. So, the types of things that we're really watching closely are, within what time
frame would we be asking the industry if we need to expand a road. Some specific language
with regard to siting of wireless facilities. We're also looking carefully at the relocation
compensation language. We have also been tracking legislation regarding the Pre Annexation
Agreements. Often when we extend water and sewer service out into the unincorporated area,
we have folks sign an agreement that when that area is ready to come into the city that they've
already agreed to join us and we feel that's in line with Growth Management objectives. If those
areas are inside our potential annexation area we're beginning to provide the infrastructure to
serve that area. Then those folks need to help us by joining us. Apparently there was some bad
experience in Puyallup where folks were not real happy and so that's where some legislation
came that would take that authority away from us. While we've been monitoring it, we've not
publicly spoken or taken a position on this bill.
It has been exciting for me to have Doug (Levy) down there this session. We are represented on
more legislation. We have more information more often and more opportunity to offer
comments on amendments that are being considered. Roger(Lubovich) has written for a bill that
is being heard tomorrow regarding the status of the liability of our probation program, which is
absolutely critical. He is really helping us stretch our resources very effectively.
The workshop adjourned at 6:30 PM.
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